A Startup that might save your life

Posted on June 17, 2008
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I am pretty sure you haven’t heard about anything similar. What Keith Larrimore, Seth Lesky, Louis Tran, and Quin Hoxie have just launched is a startup that hopes to leverage common technologies in order to help victims of emergency situations. Those guys are based in Tucson, Az and are currently open to offers from investors.

In Case of Emergency (ICE) is a startup that enables first responders, such as paramedics, firefighters, and police officers, to find victims and contact their family to obtain important medical information. The program was conceived in the mid-2000s and promoted by British paramedic Bob Brotchie. It is not a new idea, but this startup has been launched recently. So basically, it encourages people to enter emergency contacts to their cell phone’s address book under the name “ICE”. It’s really useful and easy to use.

No statistics about the number of users are available, but I expect that more than 90% of users are based in the US and Canada.

This startup hasn’t received much media coverage, but we managed to find a video that most sites have omitted. For more details: link

FotoViewr - excellent tool to integrate with Flickr and Facebook

Posted on June 12, 2008
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FotoViewr started out as someone’s pet project to learn how to program using Adobe Flash and Papervision, a 3D programming library for Flash. Then it became a project to learn about integrating with other technologies like Flickr and Facebook. FotoViewr launched in June 2008.

FotoViewr aims to provide a better experience for viewing photos. You and your friends can look at your photos by clicking on page after html page or you can immerse yourself in a highly interactive and engaging interface.

This startup has both pros and cons.

Pros

1. No registration required. You can start right-away.
2. It offers various 3D styles to choose from, be it sideways flow or a wall like interface. All the styles look unique and stunning.
3. Doesn’t require you to upload photos. You can get started in seconds.
4. It’s free to use.

Cons

1. It may not display all the photos and may just choose to display 20-30 photos in your account.
2. When I tested it, my CPU usage shot up to almost 60 %. I think they’ll have to work on this. It’s a beta app and hence bugs can be expected.

via: jeetblog

Our mark is 6/10

foto

RestyleMe - a great style advice website has been launched

Posted on June 10, 2008
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Restyleme is an innovative website has been launched to fill a gap for a service providing free personal style advice. It achieves this with its revolutionary voting system and tools that have never been used for this purpose on the internet before.

RestyleMe.com is a style advice website that allows you to rate other people’s style or fashion sense. RestyleMe.com is very different than other photo rating applications. Instead of using a 1-10 rating or stars, RestyleMe.com allows people to indicate what exactly they should keep or change regarding their style (hair, clothing and etc).

RestyleMe.com is loaded with never-seen-before features on a fashion website such as pinpoint photo marking, you can mark on users’ photos with a single click and give them feedback about their style with pinpoint accuracy; tagging of clothing items, you can tag style items or brands by selecting areas on your profile photo; detailed bar graph results, you can view detailed stats about people’s opinion on your style shown with bar graphs.

Also featuring social networking components like friend / favorite lists and userfriendly messaging, RestyleMe.com offers you unique tools to show off or improve your style.

The secret of watching videos that have been forbidden by Youtube…

Posted on May 24, 2008
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You probably remember our discussion about Deletube, the site that used to allow users to watch videos that have been forbidden by Youtube. Nowadays, there DeleTube is down and everyone is trying to find an alternative… and I am sure that you are one of those guys who are impatient to know how to do it…

It’s really simple. There is a site called YouTomb, nice name isn’ it? Whenever a video is deleted by YouTube, they publish it! So next time you write, what a pity I haven’t seen it, check it out… you might find it there…

So what’s the site about? YouTomb is a research project by MIT Free Culture that tracks videos taken down from YouTube for alleged copyright violation. More specifically, YouTomb continually monitors the most popular videos on YouTube for copyright-related takedowns. Any information available in the metadata is retained, including who issued the complaint and how long the video was up before takedown. The goal of the project is to identify how YouTube recognizes potential copyright violations as well as to aggregate mistakes made by the algorithm. Sounds like a really ambitious project.

YouTomb was built by MIT Free Culture, a student organization at MIT. Active Free Culture chapters exist at many schools and universities; they work together to promote open access to knowledge and culture. Here is a list of contributors.

When a user-submitted video is suspected to infringe copyright, the rights holder is contacted and given the option to take down the video in question. In addition, rights holders can submit DMCA takedown notifications at any time that cause YouTube to immediately remove alleged infringing content.

MIT Free Culture became especially interested in the issue after YouTube announced that it would begin using filtering technology to scan users’ video and audio for near-matches with copyrighted material. While automating the takedown process may make enforcement easier, it also means that content falling under fair-use exceptions and even totally innocuous videos may receive some of the collateral damage.

As YouTube is not very transparent with the details surrounding this process and the software used, YouTomb was conceived to shed light on YouTube’s practices, to educate the general public on the relevant copyright issues, and to provide helpful resources to users who have had their videos wrongfully taken down.

Ok, I know. It’s not perfect, but right that’s the best site in its category. I don’t know if this is an amazing startup for you, but to me it definitely has potential… what I personally don’t like is that you can’t (theoretically) download the videos…

iRead - a community for real book lovers

Posted on May 11, 2008
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iRead is a community for book lovers. Whether you love classics or popular fiction; whether you love Dickens or Dan Brown; iRead is a place where you can find others who share your reading tastes and through them discover new books that you will love. With iRead you can:

List, rate and write reviews about the books you are reading or have read in the past.
Browse what other iReaders are reading and what they are saying about books you’re interested in.
Find iReaders with similar reading interests as you and learn which books they recommend.
Have fun with books! And who wouldn’t want that?
With iRead Anywhere, you can take your bookshelf with you anywhere! for example, myspace page, blog, homepage

Only 8 months old, iRead is already one of the largest book community on facebook with over one million registered users and over 20 million books added.

ConcertAttack.com - leading online community for sharing your concert reviews, pictures and videos

Posted on May 10, 2008
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ConcertAttack.com is a leading online community for sharing your concert reviews, pictures and videos. Think Myspace/FaceBook meets YouTube, flickr and Fandango.com but, focused solely on concerts.

Theyare a Concert Experience Archive and Concert News Outlet. This basically means that they organize your concert reviews, tour journals, pictures and videos by artist and concert date which, makes them easy to find and makes them part of history. When you post your concert pictures of your favorite artists just in your Myspace profile or Facebook, that makes it hard for other fans to find them and comment on them. On those type of websites it is difficult to share pictures and opinions of the concert you went to with fellow fans outside your network because they won’t be able to find or access them.

If you post your concert content at ConcertAttack you won’t have to search thousands of web pages and social network profiles to find out about what’s going on at your favorite artists’ concerts and you will be able to easily share your concert stuff with fellow fans. That’s a piece of cake, isn’t it?

So what can you do using this startup? Just few points:
- Share your concert pictures, videos and reviews that can be left in both video and text formats.
- Recommend artists to see in concert.
- Use widgets to place your concert content on other profiles and web sites.
- For Artists, create video tour journals for your concerts
- Share your concerts with your friends.
- Set reminders for the concerts you are attending.
- Make new friends and fans.

YouCastr - revolutionizing the way fans experience their favorite sports

Posted on May 8, 2008
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YouCastr is revolutionizing the way fans experience their favorite sports by building on new and emerging technologies to create a real-time, interactive, global sports network.

YouCastr is creating an interactive sports network where fans interact with each other before, during and after a game, making the experience of following their favorite sports more fun and social. YouCastr makes it possible for fans to share the experience of enjoying the game by enabling fans to broadcast their own live audio commentary, chat with other fans in real time, and participate in live polling. Everybody loves being at the game or watching it with friends at home or at a bar, but a lot of times, those aren’t viable options. YouCastr wants to bridge the gap between being there and watching alone on TV.

With YouCastr, anyone can become a sports broadcaster. Users can easily broadcast live commentary on sporting events and create shows about their favorite local, high-school, college and pro teams. Unlike traditional radio and Internet streaming, YouCastr allows broadcasters and listeners to interact live. Whether doing play-by-play for the local high-school basketball team, providing additional commentary for college or pro games, or discussing the most recent sports headlines, YouCastr has created a unique, globally scalable platform.

Founded: June 4, 2007 (date of incorporation)
First Broadcast Event: Red Sox vs. Orioles, August 2, 2007 (Red Sox win 7-3)
Private Beta Launch Date: October 3, 2007
Public Beta Launch Date: February 20, 2008
Number of Employees: 5

Protagonize - an online community dedicated to collaborative fiction

Posted on May 8, 2008
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Protagonize is an online community originally dedicated to the (nearly) lost art of the addventure (yes, that’s spelled right), a very specific type of collaborative fiction. Recently, the site has been expanded to support the creation of linear stories, as well. TheyThe idea to revamp the concept popped up a few months ago. The old web-based collaborative fiction implementations were always a lot of fun, but were generally pretty flawed or lacking in a variety of ways. The old Snoot.com addventure site was uncontrolled and organic; there was no moderation of any sort and people pretty much ran amok, causing havoc and generally enjoying themselves in a chaotic sort of way. Protagonize is an attempt to modernize the collaborative creative writing arena a bit and inject a little Web 2.0 love to produce a better interface. So far, so good.

Are those guys reinventing the wheel here?… well, hopefully not. So, what’s different about Protagonize? Well, it allows a bit more flexibility all-around than the old implementations did. The ability to read and browse stories, branches (the individual posts that make up an addventure) and chapters is open to everyone, with or without an account. Protagonize members can post a story, branch or chapter wherever they want (registration is free, of course), as well as comment on author profiles or story fragments, and keep track of their own posts.

Members also have access to a bookshelf-style interface that allows them to flag favourite authors and stories, or add markers to track specific story branches or chapters, so as to not lose their place when reading a story. They believe that these are probably the handiest features of the bunch, as members can track their favourite authors, see what those authors have posted recently, easily navigate to new content, and the site will provide the user with suggested reading the entire time.

Readers can rate stories, which translate into author ratings based on average rating for all of an author’s stories. Each author has their own personal profile page that’s visible to everyone. The profile page aggregates each author’s content and allows readers to see similar authors, related stories, etc. Relationships between user-created content is maintained mostly via a combination of story categories and tags, though we may expand on that in the future.

To top everything off, the homepage serves as a giant content aggregator for the entire site, listing off both hot and top rated stories, providing random snippets of content extracted from story sections throughout the site, as well as recent activity, newly posted comments, top story tags presented in a cloud format, and other relevant information. Both stories and authors have their own aggregator pages as well, which act as a more focused breakdown of the higher-level topics you’ll find on the homepage.

A variety of RSS feeds are also available, such as hot stories, top rated stories, recent activity, and feeds for each author and story posted. hope this will allow the site to attract a broader community of authors looking to create collaborative, interactive fiction.

Oosah - extremely rich “Web 2.0″ digital media content management site

Posted on May 8, 2008
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Oosah is a simple, easy-to-use, but feature rich “Web 2.0″ content hosting site. They basically give you one spot on the Web where you can manage all of your digital media content - photos, videos, and music/audio files. It is designed to be easy enough for novice users to use, while at the same time providing features that even the advanced user can appreciate. Oosah is a fully Web-based application, there is no Oosah application or code that you need to download or install on your Mac or PC.

Oosah has a number of features you won’t find on other Web-based content hosting sites. These include:

A fully Web-based file management system that lets you create file folders, and file folder hierarchies, just like you can do on your desktop system.
A desktop-like look and feel for the Oosah service, including use of standard drag-and-drop, and keyboard commands for performing Oosah operations.
The ability to upload content to Oosah in almost any digital format. Oosah accepts virtually all digital photo formats, including raw, uncompressed formats from individual camera vendors, as well as standard compressed file formats (e.g., JPG/JPEG). Oosah also accepts .avi, .mpg, .wmv video formats.
The ability to upload content directly from your capture device (e.g., digital camera or cell phone) to Oosah, without having to transfer it to a PC or Mac first. (Of course, you can transfer it onto a PC or Mac, and then to Oosah if you want to.)
More sharing options than almost any other site, including email, RSS, linking/embedding, SMS, podcasting, and even downloading and burning to CD/DVD, and local high resolution printing of photos.

In a nuthsell, it’s a good project with potential that is in its beta phase and deserves attention.

Metapic - generate an infinite number of original images using rules

Posted on May 6, 2008
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Mutapic is a real creative tool. It generates ideas. The traditional way to create artwork is to start with an idea, sketch it, then render it. The idea comes from the brain, the sketch is drawn on paper and the rendering is done with any appropriate technique: painting, sculpting, etc.

When you use a computer to create artwork you still need an idea, a sketch and a render. Computer are mostly used for rendering, a technically challenging process. Computers are not used too often to generate ideas because of their obvious dumbness and poor sense of taste. Mutapic is not any smarter than your average software but it does have some taste. Mutapic generates an infinite number of original images using rules, recipes and elements that are graphically interesting. Mutapic is used for the complete creative process. Mutapic proposes ideas, makes sketches and allows you to refine your sketches until you get a final render.

Mutapic helps you to create artwork. It is a tool for designers, artists and craftsmen. It can be used to create logos, patterns, decorative elements, and just for fun!

When you use Mutapic you combine two pictures to create a third one. Those two input pictures come from a picture library on the Mutapic server. In vector format, the pictures are small, 3kb in average, allowing high quality graphics with a small file size and fast download. The two input pictures are combined locally on your machine using computer generated randomness and filters. You pick filters and the machine computes random variations. Mutapic generates 16 different pictures automatically. The pictures are ‘mutants’ because they all are variations on a single theme. When you create mutants you generally get a lot of crap; this is also what happens with mutants in nature, a lot of tests and not much success. Mutation is an unpredictable business. To avoid generating too much crap the Mutapic functionality is not completely random. All the generated random values are biased and bound to give graphically interesting results.